Ode to Nurses

The LA Times Magazine’s December issue features a poignant series of interviews with the ER nurses at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, a “number one trauma center” where the wait can be 10 minutes or four hours.
While reading this, we couldn’t help but think about not only the teams of ER nurses around the country who deserve the kind of thoughtful homage given in this article, but of nurses in all departments whose everyday stories will both uplift and break your heart.

Highlights from the article:

The nurse who did CPR in the ER driveway.

“I was triaging, the doors opened, and someone was yelling for help. It was the sound of the help; the hairs on the back of my neck stood up,” Kelly recalls. “Female, mid seventies, cold as a cucumber, not breathing, in the passenger seat. I pulled her down onto the cement. There wasn’t any time; her feet were still in the car.”

The nurse who was diagnosed with leukemia last year in his very own ER, when he showed a doctor some large bruises on his body.

“The doc ran tests while Rich was on shift and returned with the diagnosis. The story goes that he asked the doc if he could finish his shift so he wouldn’t get docked pay. After eight months off, five rounds of intravenous and oral chemo and too many bone-marrow biopsies, Rich is back working nights.”

Or the nurse who did CPR on a doctor.

“We were moving him to the OR, and he went into cardiac arrest. I jumped up on the gurney, straddled him and did CPR—in the elevator. It probably didn’t look good,” she says, brown eyes wide.

The stories in this article are tailor made for the screen…but they are real. And many of you have lived them, too. Read the article here, then share your own stories with Scrubs.